Leopold Tuček

"Bodor gave me the slip! We were off dancing at the BG club, and a soldier ran up all aghast and told us what happened. That I was supposed to go to the barracks quick, that we're in a deep mess. So I got dressed and rushed off there and said: 'What happened?' And the man on duty answered: 'Bodor took his weapon, uniform and everything, and legged it, he legged it and he's already on the other side, because we checked the wires and he'd opened the wicket.' There was a gate by the kaolin plant that could fit a large truck, and close to that was a small wicket gate for pedestrians. The soldiers would lock the gate behind them and then smooth out the dirt strip with a rake. Bodor saw us leave the HQ, he was looking on his way home, I went dancing. He was a barber, a party member, chairman of the local young socialists union, a barber who shaved us and cut our hair, and the whole barracks were open to him, everyone trusted him, as he was a comrade through and through, a party member, and he could talk. And he nabbed what he could and went over to the other side to the Americans. I almost forgot, but a while later the chief of the local counterintelligence called me to his office. "Bodor was talking about you in Free Europe. He said where you come from, that you're not a party member, what you're like, how much drink you take, how much you grumble...' They knew everything, absolutely everything in that them Free Europe. I was up to my ears in trouble because I was the commander and he had given me the slip. They sent some people from Prague to deal with the situation. And I was already so angry that I told them I couldn't give a shit, that's what I told those officers. I can leave, I said, and go back to my craft as a carpenter in Lanžhot. "You're not going nowhere, but give you a different company.' They relocated me to Dolní Paseky. And about a year later the Americans trained that Bodor as an agent and sent him in near Bratislava - he had all the necessary documents, and they, there were the Danube border guards there, and they found him tangled up in the wires, because you have the main channel and the dead-end channel of the Danube, and he mixed up somehow and got entangled in the wires and didn't get no further. And the border guard found him there drowned."

“That was when spring was nearing, because I was the company commander at Nový Žďár. And because we had an enormous meadow there, the boys would go to mow it. They would dry the hay and stack it up. The grass there was waist-high. There really was a lot of hay there - several mounds. Some of the boys could speak German, and the woman, the pub keeper, she was right buxom, she used to wear a kind of bonnet on her head, she had roses embroidered on her dress, that was the pub keeper - the owner of the farm. And she was letting a room for the Americans. And she made a deal with some of the soldiers that she would need at least a few stacks of the dry hay, that they should put them close to her pub - they would otherwise clear it away. Well, and the soldier, like little boys, no party training in their minds, mowed, dried and so on. And I asked them: ‘Why did you put it there like that?’ And they said: ‘There’s a road there, you can drive in there just nice, you know.’ There was a kerb in the direction of the pub, and the hay could be loaded up there. I didn’t pay it any more attention as there were many such stacks of hay. There were some four or five big stacks close to the pub. When it was time to gather the hay, I noticed there was less of it than usual. And the soldiers said: ‘Well, you know, it must have been trodden down...’ And then when we were there on horseback one time, to see how well it was mowed, the woman, the pub keeper, came up with her hands full of, I don’t know if she was carrying four or five Bavarian beers, she came up and said: ‘Guten Tag, Herr Kommandant...’ That it was just a goodwill token. I said: ‘What token, for what? We have nothing to do with you.’ But she just said it was so we could taste Bavarian beer. I was a bit afraid there might be some spies [counterintelligence] watching us with binoculars, who would see us guzzling beer... But in the end we each took a beer. And what good beer it was! Later when I was gone [from the company in Nový Žďár], someone blew the whistle. So I finally found out that the beer hadn’t been for free. The Germans had come in the night, loaded the hay up on barrows and taken it away. And removed their traces.”

“The Americans had a look-out tower at Hohenberg Castle. A from there they could see the whole of our section. They made note of our patrols, and we had a playing field over here. And when we saw them flashing their binoculars, the boys pulled their trousers down and stuck out their bare bum towards the German castle... We saw the Americans. They would drive down by the road in jeeps and check the area around Hammermühle, but they wouldn’t waste much time at the border, they just looked round and then drove off again in their jeep.”

“He rode there by motorbike, past Krásná and then on through Nové Domy, and he maintained the waterworks in operation. He cleaned the wells and replenished the crushed marble. That was because of filtration. The water worker said he would need a couch or sofa in the building - so he could lie down when he was exhausted, as at point he could only sit or lie on the ground. So they gave him permission to take the furniture there, and one day he came up and said [to the BG patrol): ‘I’ve got the couch with me at last.’ His motorbike was towing a trailer with the couch on it. The boys didn’t check it, they trusted him a hundred percent, and he had his wife and two small children hidden in the couch. He’d taken the springs out of the couch and they were hidden inside, lying there. He drove through and there was someone here for an inspection, they went past the wires, and discovered that the water worker was gone. We then received a message that he on the other side - with his wife and children - he had escaped. I knew him, the water worker. He was a shaggy bloke, good with his hands. He showed them everything - as the water worker he had a pass [into the border zone] and a passport. There weren’t many boys like that - those, who were on the other side of the fence.”